Random Hearts Page 3

  "He needs it tomorrow."

  "I'm not a computer." There was a brief pause. "The sky is falling in."

  "That's all everyone is thinking about," he repeated, remembering snows back in the Midwest. In a child's world they were welcomed with great joy. Somewhere deep in the back of his mind he heard sleigh bells. A lost world. He sighed, wondering if that meant he had finally become a realist.

  Hanging up, he swiveled again to look through the window. Great clumps of snow fell silently. Cars crawled slowly through the streets. People bent their heads as they struggled forward against the blizzard's onslaught. It was lucky that Lily had a head start on it, he thought.

  "It's snowing," Lily had said, opening the draperies earlier that morning. She had fiddled with the dial of the radio until she found a weather report.

  "Six to ten inches," he had heard the announcer say, and then he ceased to think about it. His mind groaned under the weight of what he had to do that day, and he was still tired from having worked into the early morning. Her suitcase was already packed and waiting in the bedroom, he noted as he slid in beside her, making sure to keep his cold flesh from making contact with her curled sleeping body—not that they ever slept entwined. Carefully, he had leaned over to plant a kiss in her hair, a ritual with him. Striving time, he had sighed. It was the way both justified their frenetic pace. The object was to cut themselves from the pack, make their mark. It was the way he was taught to tackle life, and, he assumed, it was the same with Lily. Nothing came without sacrifice. She understood completely how hard he had to work on the Hill and how much it meant to him, although she deprecated the political life in her lightly mocking way. Political science had never been her most pressing interest. Nor was the world of fashion his.

  "It's not a science," she had said often, especially when he got lofty and overinflated in assessing his work. She also mocked the Congressman as well: "He suffers from galloping egomania."

  "You're right there," he told her. "But some stepping stones have got to be utilized." What he wanted was to run himself one day, which was why he continued to keep his official residence in Iowa. He had set that goal for the late eighties. Barring that, his alternate ambition was to move to the Senate or the White House in some decision-making capacity.

  His father had been mayor of their little town in Iowa, and although he died when Edward was fourteen, the man had implanted in him the idea of politics as a career. "It's a good life, son," he remembered his father saying, "as long as you keep your real feelings to yourself."

  He had not quite understood what that meant at the time. It had taken a couple of years in Washington to drive the message home.

  "It's like the retail business," he had often told Lily, who worked for Woodies, the town's largest department store. "You dispense a product to fill a perceived need. If it sells, you profit. If the customer doesn't like what he's bought, he brings it back."

  "Problem is, when you elect a politician, you never really know what you're buying. At least with selling clothes, you can try it on first."

  "Like getting married."

  She blushed lightly. Before their marriage they had lived together for a year, much to the embarrassment of Lily's traditional Italian family in Baltimore. In the end they had yielded to convention, although he, a Protestant and non-Italian, was hardly acceptable to the clannish Corsinis. But at least they were not living in sin.

  Her promotion to buyer had altered their tentative plans for children, and the idea simply vanished as an issue between them. The fact was that there was no real issue between them, no contentious nagging theme. They were busy, ambitious people, tolerant of each other's outside job pressures. If there were vague yearnings or dissatisfactions, they never came up. Maybe this is what happiness is, he decided. No big highs. No deep lows. Mutual consideration was the watchword. The emotional thing, he supposed, had mellowed, matured into another phase.

  "Be sure you eat right," she had warned. Dressed and shaved, he had come into the kitchen of their apartment on "Q" Street in Georgetown. He had a tendency toward eating quick snacks and junk food, which had thickened his gut. "There are some steaks in the freezer." She had been making a list for him, which she placed on the refrigerator with a magnet. He really enjoyed her concern. He was a bit absentminded and self-absorbed at times.

  "I'm perfectly capable—" he began.

  "Of not taking care of yourself," she admonished.

  "I'll manage," he said, brooding into his coffee. Actually, he hated her trips. Part of the game, he supposed. Life with a wife was a lot different now than in his father's time. He remembered his mother, always bustling about the three of them, his father, his sister, and himself. After Dad died and Sis left the house to get married and he went off to college, that was it for his mother. The Lord took her because of uselessness, people had said. Perhaps it was that memory that had made him so intensely supportive of Lily's career.

  "I'll be gone only four days," she said. He felt her eyes watching him as he buttered his toast and read George Will, who occasionally infuriated him.

  "Priggish supercilious bastard," he said. As he looked up, she turned her eyes away; her gaze drifted toward the window. The Style section of the Post lay on the table next to her coffee. She had not opened it.

  "At least it doesn't snow in L.A.," he said.

  "What?" Her concentration was elsewhere.

  Shrugging, he looked at the weather report in the paper. "Low sixties in L.A. But rain."

  "Won't matter," she said, lifting her coffee mug and watching him with her dark eyes peering over the rim. "I'll be inside most of the time."

  "What time does the plane leave?"

  "Noon."

  "Lucky lady."

  "I'm not sure where I'll be," she said.

  "Will you call?"

  "I'll try."

  "It will be all right. I'll be so damned busy anyhow. Just come home safe and sound."

  He got up from the table and put on his jacket, which was rumpled from having lain in a heap on the floor near the bedroom chair. His collar was open, and the tail of his tie hung unevenly below his belt. He felt her inspection and quickly buttoned his shirt.

  "A mess, right?"

  "You haven't exactly walked out of Gentleman's Quarterly."

  She had tried to remake him into a sleek fashionable image. That, after all, was her business. She could get discounts in Woodies on men's clothes, but getting him to shop had been an impossible task.

  "A hopeless case," he said cheerfully, bending down to peck her cheek. Not that he was bad-looking. A shock of tight black curly hair which, fearing her disapproval, he kept neatly trimmed. Square jaw with a deep cleft, the blessing of good even teeth, showing whiter against a dark complexion. Actually, he could pass for being athletic, which he wasn't, but it was an image that had given him good marketability.

  Only his eyes gave away his innocence and his vulnerability. People said that, but he was never sure why.

  "A hangdog look," Lily told him one day after they had met. "Like a spaniel." He had looked in the mirror. "I don't see it," he concluded. "Nobody ever sees themselves," she had laughed.

  "But I am lovable." He patted his belly. "And when I get chubbier, I'll be even more endearing." It surprised him that she did not smile at his banter. Preoccupied, he supposed. Pressure of work. Anxiety about the trip. He dismissed the slight ruffle. He did not want her to go, but to tell her that would sound selfish. He was very careful not to provoke guilt about her career. Above all, he wanted her to be happy.

  "Anyway, you knock 'em dead. And don't worry about calling. I'll survive."

  "You take care," she said wistfully. He stopped on the way out to give her one last appraisal.

  "You're one beautiful lady," he said. He was never gratuitous about that. To him, she was beautiful. "Whoever made you knew how to put things together."

  "Button up," she called after him. "It's twenty-four degrees."

  Leaving, he felt
the emptiness of parting. Only four days, he thought. Not a lifetime.

  The icy air had jolted him. By the time the car warmed, his mind was on the impending day, which he knew would be difficult. The snow was already thick on the ground as he sloshed through it from the parking lot to his office. As the day wore on it became more and more apparent that his prediction was correct. It's the weather, he decided. It upset the balance. Harvey Mills came in and put a speech draft on his desk.

  Looking up he observed the young man, a tangled hirsute mess with tight curly hair grown over his ears and a shaggy mustache that hadn't seen a clipper for months, if ever. With his round-rimmed glasses, he looked a lot like he himself had looked before Lily had done him over. Maybe that was why he had hired the younger man.

  Harvey Mills slumped in a chair, his myopic eyes squinting into the whiteness behind Edward, who had begun to read the speech until Harvey's gaze distracted him.

  "It's mesmerizing," Harvey said, unable to tear his eyes away.

  "It's loused up my day. It's as if you people never saw snow before," Edward muttered.

  "It reminds us of what's in short supply around here. Purity."

  His telephone rang. He picked it up, scowling at the young man. It was Jan.

  "In its wisdom, the U.S. Government is calling off the day."

  He groaned and looked up at Harvey, whose eyes continued to focus on the window behind him.

  "Odd what a little white stuff will do." He gathered up the papers and went into the outer office where the staff was in various stages of preparation to brave the blizzard. He had it in his mind to persuade them to stay, but even that last shred of optimism was exploded when a white-faced young woman ducked her head into the office.

  "Don't go over Fourteenth Street," she cried with a touch of hysteria in her voice. He recognized her from another congressman's office across the hall. Before anyone could ask for a calmer explanation, she rattled off the details.

  "A plane crashed. Out of National Airport. It sheared off the tops of cars on the Fourteenth Street Bridge and crashed into the Potomac!"

  Before she had finished, someone turned on the television set, and an announcer confirmed what the woman had said, although there were no pictures from the scene.

  "Seven thirty-seven. A big bird," Harvey muttered.

  As in all disasters, Edward knew that thinking immediately of loved ones was perfectly natural. A brief panic seized him until he remembered that Lily had left from Dulles.

  "Flight ninety. Southair heading for Miami..." the announcer said, which was enough to calm his fears and leave him only to face the obvious, which was that there was no way to hold people in tow now. The uncommon event had once and for all ruled out the possibility of any useful labor for the day.

  "How many were killed?" one of the girls asked.

  "There were eighty-four in all. They think only four survived," someone said. He went back into his own office, slamming the door. Of course it was a terrible tragedy, but it had little to do with him.

  4

  Before she opened her eyes, at the very moment of consciousness, Vivien knew by the alteration of familiar sounds that the snow was already thick on the ground. It aroused pleasant memories of shivery mornings in her parents' house in Vermont when she had also known instinctively, before she pulled the shades, that a white quilt had settled on the landscape.

  Not wanting to disturb Orson, she slipped on a robe and moved swiftly to the kitchen bay window, through which she could see the garden, beautiful and serene under its crystalline white coat. Rubbing his eyes, Ben came in behind her, squinting into the whiteness.

  "Snow," she said, embracing him. "Glorious snow."

  Hamster, their poodle, stretched and wagged his tail. He had been Orson's Christmas present to Ben two years before.

  "Are you in for a surprise, hound!" She laughed, opened the door, and watched a hesitant Hamster sniff at the white flakes. Pushing his rear, she edged him out the door where he was soon thrashing about, leaving paw marks and yellow dribbles in the snow.

  "We'll make a snowman later," she said to Ben, filling a bowl with dry Cream of Wheat and mixing it with water from the Instant-Hot.

  "No kindergarten, Mommy?" Ben asked, climbing on a chair, the blue of his eyes enlarged by the brightness. No sense fighting the snow today, she decided, feeling a faint flush of anxiety when she remembered Orson's trip.

  The snow meant other complications as well. She had planned to shop in town.

  "No way," she said, putting the bowl, brimming with honey, on the table in front of Ben.

  "A big snowman?"

  "As big as we can make it."

  One thing about Vermonters, she thought, they knew all about snow. Today's was dry and heavy, perfect for snow sculpture. Vermonters knew how to live with snow, how to cope with it and enjoy it. Not like these prissy southerners. Snow destroyed their equilibrium. She made herself a cup of instant coffee and warmed her hands on the cup.

  From the kitchen window, the view could have been a Vermont scene. A thick stand of evergreens edged the large expanse of lawn. The snow had already obliterated the bounds of her vegetable garden and coated the low shrubs into unidentifiable shapes.

  Orson came in, wearing a flannel robe. She rose from the table and made him a cup of coffee, then looked out the window.

  "Reminds me of our neck of the woods," she said. He nodded, his eyes squinting into the brightness.

  "Think they'll fly?" she asked.

  "Of course."

  Orson had been raised in Newton, a suburb of Boston, but his memories were not as sentimental. His parents had divorced when he was still in his teens, and his mother had shipped him off to boarding schools while she lived most of the time with a new husband in Palm Springs, California.

  "We're going to make a snowman," Ben said, dripping Cream of Wheat on his chin.

  "If we make it solid enough, maybe it will still be here when Daddy comes home from Paris."

  "You can never tell about Washington weather. In one day, all of it could melt," Orson said.

  "In Vermont you could build a snowman and be sure it was standing until April."

  "They build things to last up there," he mimicked with tight lips and a twang. Compared to his early life, hers had been ... well, uncomplicated: loving parents, a clap-board house in a town where her dad was the only pharmacist. Doc's daughter, she was. Even now when she visited they called her Doc's daughter.

  "Practical solid people," she said, "corny and wonderful." The snow had unleashed memories.

  "Like us."

  She was not sure how he meant that, but she let it pass. His humor was often wry in the morning.

  "Will they take you to Maxim's?" she asked.

  "I suppose," he said, but he seemed vague and distracted.

  "Give me Paris in the spring," she said. "We had a great time in Paris. Maybe you'll get a chance to go again in the spring. Then you can take me."

  "Maybe."

  "Me, too?" Ben piped.

  "It's not for kids," Vivien said, touching his face. "It's for lovers," she giggled.

  "Yuk," Ben said.

  When she turned toward the window again, Orson had already gone back to the bedroom. She followed him.

  "Did you find the shirts?" she asked, removing her robe and nightgown, and slipping on jeans and a blouse.

  "Yes."

  One of his Brahmin moods, she decided. She had learned that the best way to deal with them was to ignore them. His mind, when it concentrated on a problem, often made him seem fuzzy and disconcerted to those around him. Coming out of her bedroom she went to Ben's and helped him dress in boots and a snowsuit. For good measure she tied a scarf around his neck and pulled his woolen hat over his forehead. Then she put a shovel in his hands and sent him into the garden.

  "You start. When Daddy leaves, I'll be out to help you." She watched as he frolicked in the snow. His first act was to throw a snowball at Hamster. Watching them made
her feel lighthearted and joyful.

  "God, snow makes me feel good," she said when Orson came out of the shower. She looked at him and smiled. "I wish you could stay home and play with us."

  "Duty calls," he muttered, turning away.

  "Sure you've got everything you need?" she asked. He had packed himself the night before.

  "I'm sure."

  She could never fault his self-reliance, and she was proud of him for that, and for his brains and good looks as well. A take-charge man, her mother had called him from the beginning. There was never any doubt that Orson Simpson was going places, although sometimes she did feel slightly subservient. Not that he flaunted his surety. Unlike her, he simply had definite ideas about things. She was more of a muller, more of a Vermonter. It was a trait that mimicked being indecisive, which she did not feel she was.

  If she felt on occasion a sense of deficiency, it came strictly from unsuitable comparisons, which she quickly rationalized in her no-nonsense New England manner. Being a wife and mother was a full-time job. She was not one of those women pressured to pursue a career, although she had been doing very nicely as a secretary when Orson was just getting started, an honorable profession with good wages. What jobs were around for English majors? Someday she would go back to school and take her master's, and maybe a Ph.D.

  Meanwhile, she would concentrate on being a good wife and mother, like her own mom. Only she would not let Ben be an only child. If there was any serious ripple in her normal tranquillity, it was on that subject.

  "Not yet," Orson had told her. "Give Ben a chance to be an entity."

  An entity. It seemed a strange word to describe a child. But she did not wish to be a nag about it. Nothing worse than a nag.

  She began to make their bed and tidy up.

  "I'm leaving three hundred in cash," he said, counting out the money on the bureau, "just in case." He had always handled their finances, although she had her own checking account from which she managed to squirrel away extra money. Actually, she had saved nearly ten thousand dollars—hers to use as she wished.

  "It's only four days," she said. "With all this snow, what's there to spend it on?"